Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s)

Abstract

This essay discusses the recent efforts to redefine the discursive strategies and critical objectives of American Studies in the context of Lawrence Grossberg's very critical re-assessment of the triumphal success of British Studies in the U. S. during the 1990s. The New Americanists have reclaimed the historical and political dimensions of American (Culture) Studies, opened the perspective to postnational narratives, and placed their work in the wider context of American imperialism and a globalizing world. The essay points out, however, that the various attempts at internationalizing American Studies tend to be built on a unidirectional perspective that is in danger of constructing and re-appropriating the articulations of intracultural as well as of interor cross-cultural differences. As an alternative, it suggest a more radical version of dialogical cultural critique in/of American Studies that draws on the dialectics of border discourses in American multicultural critique and projects a new dialogics of International American Culture Studies, of the encounter of American and foreign scholars in a bior multidirectional joint venture, as well as briefly indicating some crucial case studies. American Studies and British Studies In the late 1960s, American Studies was in a deep crisis. It was declared intellectually bankrupt, politically reactionary, a handmaiden of American imperialism during the Cold War era, and a failure in its effort to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of American culture as a whole, past and present. ТЪе various redefinitions that were given during the 1970s and early 1980s usually replaced key terms or critical approaches that had characterized the field by their opposites without seriously reconceptualizing the formative principles and objectives of American Studies in a rapidly changing cultural and theoretical context. American Studies as an integrative study of American culture fell apart and was replaced by a sequence of politically engendered and committed interdisciplinary programs such as Black Studies, Women's Studies, Urban Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Native-American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Asian-American Studies, Queer Studies, etc. that, however, often seemed to have to face methodological and institutional problems similar to those of the American Studies programs they rejected. Anyway, American Studies did not seem to work any longer anywhere near the frontiers of contemporary scholarship. Thus, it did not come as a surprise that when British Studies was widely discovered during the second half of the 1980s, and the famous Cultural Studies Now and in the Future conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 provided the defining moment for a triumphal success of Studies in the United States during the 1990s, it was received as another wave of traveling theory from Europe. Studies from the Birmingham Centre seemed to offer new anThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:07:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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